Modem networking continues to provide an improvement in communication and information access. As an example, in-house data centers, associated with a particular entity or interrelated group of users, could contain a large number of information technology (IT) resources that are interconnected through a network. The resources in the in-house data centers are managed by network administrators.
Traditional in-house data centers consist of a conglomerate of many unique IT environments. Each of the IT environments are grown and managed specific to the needs of their particular IT environment. As such, computing resources in each of the environments of the in-house data center are in part constantly being physically replaced, physically switched around from IT environment to IT environment, physically removed, physically added, etc.
Moreover, the IT environments are often patched together to form the in-house data center. As such, the network or data center of computing resources can be large and complex. This patchwork infrastructure containing the IT environments in the in-house data center can create a number of challenges. In particular, verification of attributes for computing resources in the in-house data center can be difficult and costly.
In the past, a manual process was implemented by a network administrator for the collection of attributes for computing resources in an in-house data center. The network administrator would login into each of the computing resources individually to start the manual process. Then, the network administrator would issue the necessary commands to display the configuration attributes of the queried computing resource. This procedure could take several minutes to collect the configuration attributes of a single device, leading to a tedious and inefficient use of personnel as well as computing resources.
Automated processes have been implemented in the prior art for the retrieval of configuration attributes for computing resources in an in-house data center. This automated process can be used for determining what computing resources are available and their status in each of the IT environments of the in-house data center. Automation of this process is particularly useful for keeping track of computing resources since each of the IT environments within the in-house data center are constantly changing with respect to the physical locations of computing resources and their use.
However, in the prior art, the automation of discovering configuration attributes for computing resoruces in an in-house data center was limited to discovery only. The network administrator would necessarily manually check to see if the proper computing resources, and their corresponding configuration attributes, were allocated to the correct IT environment. In other words, the network administrator must manually determine, in the prior art, whether the IT environments were configured correctly with the right computing resources to meet the IT environment's objectives and resource requests. This verification of computing resources through their attributes can be a complex and tedious process when manually performed by a network administrator especially with larger numbers of computing resources in each of IT environments in the in-house data center.